Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) – a man to hate?

I once heard a gentleman say, with some vehemence, ‘I hate Luther’.

There is plenty to hate about Luther’s Reformation – the ripping apart of Christendom, the religious wars, and, worst of all, the vicious Antisemitism. 

There is also plenty about Luther that makes it almost impossible to hate him – his vulnerability, his genius, the herculean output.

A man to hate or not? It is not an easy question. We will start with why it is difficult to hate him; and then move to the dark shadows that might mean, especially in today's climate, that we should campaign for his forty plus statues to be torn down. 

Vulnerability

Reading about Luther it is difficult not to feel sympathy. His early days as a monk were difficult; he was plagued by depression; he was the underdog who challenged an establishment that burnt its enemies; and he was a father who buried two of his own children.

Difficult start

Luther believed in hell and did not want to go there. So, when nearly struck by lightning in July 1505, his fragile mortality laid bare, Luther vowed to become a monk. This was the surest way to save your soul from the eternal fires. He abandoned his legal studies and entered the Augustinian monastery in July 1505.

His father, Hans Luther, a miner from peasant stock, was enraged, leaving Luther very disturbed. The day a monk celebrated his first Mass was a joyous occasion: not for Luther. It started well. His father arrived with twenty horsemen, and Hans made a generous gift to the monastery. Luther was hopeful for a reconciliation, so at the celebratory meal after the Mass he turned to his father and asked about his father’s opposition to his monastic call. One biographer, Roland Bainton, writes: ‘This was too much for old Hans…He flared up before all the doctors and the masters and the guests, ‘You learned scholar, have you never read in the Bible that you should honour your father and mother? And here you have left me and your dear mother to look after ourselves in our old age’. Stunned Luther reminded his father of his heavenly calling. Hans said this could have been the apparition of the devil.

It is hard surely not to feel some sympathy here for the young Luther – his fear of hell, facing the opposition of his parents, the hope for a kind word from his father.

Depression

Before that first Mass Luther had a terrible attack of nerves. He was petrified he might make a mistake. Later he wrote, ‘Who am I, that I should lift up my hands to the divine Majesty? At his nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable little pygmy, say I want this, I ask for that?’

This emotional intensity often turned into what we call depression, but what Luther called, anfechtung. This comes from the German word fechten which means to 'fence with'. It is battling with your own thoughts, the devil and his demons. This was hell for Luther, or, as another biographer Eric Metaxas says, 'a widening hole of sheer hopelessness, an increasing cacophony of devils voices accusing him of a thousand things.' 

Luther's inner unrest soon showed itself in the monastery. He was a conscientious monk. As he put it colourfully – ‘If ever a monk got to heaven through monasticism, I should have been that man’. But he was never sure if he had done enough. ‘My conscience could never give me certainty: I always doubted and said ‘You did not do that correctly’. This meant he spent a lot of time in the confession box, so much so that his confessor, the kindly Johann von Staupitz, eventually became frustrated. He told Luther, ‘‘If you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive – parricide, blasphemy, adultery – instead of all these peccadilloes.’

At times Luther’s depression became so severe he would wake up in a cold sweat – feeling wholly abandoned, facing only the wrath of God. It was despair. In 1518 he wrote, ‘God appears horrifyingly angry and with him the whole creation. There can be no flight, nor consolation either from within or from without, but all is accusation…the soul cannot believe that it can ever be redeemed.’

It is likely that it was Luther’s inner battles that led him – now as a Professor of Theology at the new university of Wittenberg – to study the Bible obsessively and to re-discover the doctrine of justification of faith where the believer in Christ can be sure of God’s favour.

One would then perhaps expect Luther’s battle with depression to end. It didn’t. During his time in hiding in the fortress of Wartburg (1521-22) he endured insomnia and nightmares. According to another biographer, Vivian Green, Luther felt the devil everywhere: ‘He heard him rattling the hazel nuts in a sack; he listened to him scuttling down the stairs, making a great racket of it as his cloven hoofs hit the stone.’

In 1527 his anfechtung was ferocious. On the morning of July 6^th he woke with overwhelming feelings of sadness and his own unworthiness. He stumbled through that day, and in the evening, tormented in his spirit, was convinced he was going to die. He did not die, but for the next two weeks he could neither read or write. The depression lingered on into the autumn. In August he wrote to his friend and colleague, Philip Melanchthon. ‘I have lost Christ completely and have been shaken by the floods and storms of despair and blasphemy.’

It is normal to feel sympathy for those who endure this grim malady. Even more so when a man prone to depression is ready stand up against an all-powerful establishment.

The underdog on trial at Worms

There is nothing in Luther’s background that speaks of wealth or power. So, watching him appear before the assembled might of the state and church at Worms in April 1521 has all the drama of all the David and Goliath stories ever told.

If Luther had been the clever poor man out to make a mark on the world, a Thomas Wolsey (the son of an Ipswich butcher) or a Thomas Cromwell (the son of brewer in Putney) perhaps we might feel less sympathy. But Luther had no ambition to become a heroic leader. It was only when many of his Wittenberg parishioners travelled just twenty-five miles to Juterborg in the spring of 1517 to buy indulgences from Johan Tetzel that he felt bound to act. Today many are disgusted with indulgences – a piece of paper promising forgiveness of sins – because it was a vulgar money-making scam; however for Luther the issue was pastoral and theological. He was appalled that his parishioners would be deceived into thinking they had booked themselves a place in heaven for mere money, without any repentance or faith in Christ.

Luther’s response was the normal one for a priest and academic. As a priest he preached against indulgences and wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz; as an academic he posted an invitation to discuss 95 theses about indulgences on the Wittenberg university notice board – the door of the cathedral. The theses were in Latin, they were for his colleagues, not the ordinary man. Luther was not wanting to start the Reformation; he wanted to iron out the theological issue of indulgences.

So if the church had ignored Luther there might well have been no Reformation, for Luther was not at all interested in a confrontation with Rome when he posted his theses. But the church did respond. When Tetzel heard about the theses the former inquisitor said he would soon be throwing Luther to the fire. He meant it literally. Tetzel went onto frame the debate solely as Luther standing against the Pope’s authority, and so when eventually the matter reached Rome, even the ‘polished dilletante’ Leo X felt obliged to act. This eventually led to Luther being summoned to appear before the Emperor, the young and orthodox Charles V, at the Diet of Worms to defend his teaching.

It is hard not to like Luther travelling the long road from Wittenberg to Worms in early spring 1521. On the way he taught his companions from the Book of Joshua; or he played the lute for them. And when he received a message to turn back because he faced certain arrest and execution, Luther’s resolve was not shaken: He wrote to his friend Spalatin, the secretary to the Elector of Saxony, who had sent the warning: ‘Christ lives and we shall enter Worms in spite of all the gates of hell and the powers in the air’.

And it is hard not to like him as he enters what for him was a criminal court room full of some of the most powerful people in the world. Metaxas paints the scene well:

‘The seven electors themselves were there, plus innumerable archbishops and princes and dukes and other nobles, all decked out in their sumptuous and bejewelled best, replete with gaudy golden chains and befeathered hats, and all of them stood agape at the curious spectacle of this humble monk waking into their midst.’

Luther messed up as soon as came into the Emperor’s presence. He saw a friend and greeted him cheerfully. For this he earned a rebuke from the marshal. He was only to speak when spoken to. An eye witness at the Diet wrote this about Luther:

He was ‘about forty years old, somewhat more or less, robust in physique and face, with not especially good eyes and lively features which he frivolously changed’

This seeming frivolity also irked the Pope’s nuncio who wrote in a letter: 

‘The fool entered with a smile on his face and kept moving his head back and forth, up and down, in the presence of the emperor’.

There is a simple reason for Luther’s demeanour. He was nervous. This is confirmed when he is shown the books he has written and asked whether he is the author. An observer noted this about Luther’s reply.

‘He spoke with a subdued, soft voice, as if frightened and shocked, with little calm in his visage and gestures, also with little deference in his attitude and countenance.’

We now know how this part of story ends. Luther was condemned by Charles, but managed to leave Worms and shortly after was kidnapped by friends and taken to hide in a castle in Wartburg.

But Luther did not know this.

When he entered his court-room he was the heretical underdog standing before an all-powerful master and ecclesiastical establishment. The choice he was facing was to either recant, or be burnt at the stake.

The natural human emotion to such a situation is sympathy, not hate. Indeed to hate Luther in this scene, whatever your religious beliefs, would be akin to hating David before Goliath, or Paul before Agrippa – or Jesus before Pontius Pilate.

Burying his children

Most of us feel not just sympathy but acute pain when we meet someone who has had to bury one of their own children. It is true that until recently this was common, but that does not take away the agony of the experience.

Luther had to bury two of his children.

The ex-monk Luther married the ex-nun Katherina von Bora in June 1525. They had six children, and also brought up four orphans. Their first son Hans was born a year later, and in December 1527 Luther had his first daughter, Elizabeth.

Luther was apprehensive about the delivery because in August the plague had come to Wittenberg. Other university staff had moved with their families to Jena, Luther felt duty bound to stay and care for the sick in their home. During this time the wife of Luther’s secretary, Hanna Rorer, had given birth to a still born child, and she herself then died of the plague. Luther writes, ‘I am concerned about the delivery of my wife, so greatly has the example of the Deacon’s wife affected me.’ Worse his first son was struck down and for several days was unable to eat.

Hans survived, Katherine had a normal delivery and Elizabeth came into the world – for a little while. She died eight months later. Katherine thought it was because of the plague, so implying that if the family had moved with others out of Wittenberg their daughter might still have lived.

She wrote: The good Lord gave me a little girl, the sweet little Elisabeth. Here, the plague is dead and buried. However, it seemed as if the terrible scourge had marked the child, even before she was born. After eight months, the sweet little Elisabeth said goodbye to her father and her mother to go to Christ.’

Luther was overwhelmed by grief:

‘It is amazing what a grieving, almost womanly heart she has bequeathed me. Never would I have believed that a father’s heart could feel so tenderly for his child.’

Some light filtered into this sadness the next year when Katherine gave birth to a baby girl, Magdalena. The little girl was known as, Lenchen, which means the shining or torch. All was healthy and well in her childhood but when she was thirteen, in the autumn of 1542, she suddenly fell ill with a high fever. Her brother Hans, away at a boarding school, was fetched back, and the family gathered for Magdalena’s last days. She died in Luther’s arms at 9.00 a.m. on September 20^th. When she was placed in the coffin Luther said, ‘Go ahead and close it’. As the coffin was carried out of the home he said, ‘Do not be sorrowful. I have sent a saint to heaven’. Then he paused, remembering Elizabeth, ‘In fact I have now sent two’.

Luther’s words were brave, but grief knifed his heart. ‘How strange it is to know that she is at peace and all is well, and yet to be so sorrowful.’ And while he knew the sovereignty of God to be true, his heart struggled. He wrote, ‘I am angry with myself that I am unable to rejoice from my heart and be thankful to God’. We have no words from Katherine, but it is reported that she wept uncontrollably for days.

To hate this very vulnerable man in this scene stripped bare by the reaper is barely possible.

There is no doubt more in Luther’s story which points to his vulnerability, but in these scenes of him as a young man longing for the approval of his father, as a victim of depression, as a heretic on trial before the emperor, as a father burying his children I find it hard to understand how we can hate him.

Luther was a vulnerable man; he was also exceptionally talented.

Genius

Unless a gifted man is a complete monster – a Pol Pot, a Himmler – then the normal emotion most people feel for talented people is admiration. We will come to whether Luther was a monster, but first it is worth reminding ourselves that he was a genius.

There is Luther’s genius as a theologian. He joined the monastery in Erfurt in 1505 and by 1508 he had been awarded his doctorate. As the Professor of Theology at Wittenberg Luther’s classes were very popular with students, the output impressive. In total he lectured on twenty-five books of the Bible, still at work just a few months before his death. He is still read today, his achievement of making the Bible (not Aristotle or any other philosopher) the major text for the church still felt around the world.

There is his genius as a translator. The intensity of his work is astounding, as any one with any experience of Bible translation will happily acknowledge. Metaxas here has a colourful comment about his translation of the New Testament: ‘That Luther managed to pull off the entirety of this project in eleven weeks has boggled the mind of scholars for half a millennium’ The New Testament was published in 1522; the Old Testament in 1534. Luther translated directly from the Hebrew, but to get the right German phrase he made secret visits into towns, listening to the language of the street. Of course there are now many German versions of the Bible; but the German Bible is Luther’s.

Luther was also a brilliant communicator. Printers made a lot of money out of his writings for he never took any payment and he was a sensational best seller. The printer Melchio Lotter printed 4,000 copies of Luther’s ‘To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation’. In two weeks it had sold out. Lotter went on to sell ten more editions.

Luther’s genius impacted church life radically. He devised a complete liturgy in German, and encouraged music and hymn singing. The only singing heard by most Christians in the Middle Ages was the chanting of the Psalms in Latin by the clergy or monks. The congregation never sang.  Luther changed all that for he was an ardent enthusiast for music:

He wrote, in his usual robust style:

‘I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the devil and makes people gay (happy); they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and the like. Next after theology I give to music the highest place and the greatest honour.’

And so it stands that Luther is the father of congregational singing.

It is probably Roland Bainton who best sums up Luther as a man to admire:

‘If no Englishman occupies a similar place in the religious life of his people, it is because no Englishman had anything like Luther’s range. The Bible translation was the work of Tyndale, the prayer book of Cranmer, the catechism of the Westminster divines. The sermonic style stemmed from Latimer; the hymnbook from Watts. And not all of these lived in one century. Luther did the work of more than five men. And for sheer richness and exuberance of vocabulary and mastery of style he is to be compared only with Shakespeare.’

Bainton has another telling comment: ‘In the course of three hundred years only one German ever really understood Luther, and that one was Johann Sebastian Bach.’

There is of course much more that could be said about Luther’s genius and his achievements. The question here is whether in the midst of all these formidable achievements, the word hate for Luther makes any sense.

As said, only if he were a monster; otherwise the normal emotion must be admiration.

Monster Shadows

But there are serious, even monster like shadows. There is Luther’s connivance at bigamy; the invective of some of his writing; the violence of his tract against the peasants, and, worst of all, his vicious stance against the Jews.

The Reformation became a reality because Luther and his colleagues were protected by two German princes – Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse. The latter had an unhappy arranged marriage and had developed a tendency to commit adultery. This disturbed his conscience and kept him from the sacrament. Philip’s answer was that he should be allowed to marry a second wife, following the example of the patriarchs in the Old Testament. When he first approached Luther with this idea in 1526 it was politely rejected. Philip’s adultery continued, but in the late 1530s, possibly fearing death, he was determined to square the circle and demanded permission from the religious leaders to be allowed to marry the lady in waiting to his sister. Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and Martin Bucer, the revered stars of Reformation, gave their reluctant permission as long as the second marriage was kept secret.

Keeping such a business secret was wishful thinking. The whole of Europe soon knew and the cause of the Reformation rightly sullied. For this was a cowardly surrender to a powerful man who wanted to both sin and have the church’s blessing. In a letter to his own prince, the Elector of Saxony, Luther said his ‘concession was on account of the great need of his conscience’. This is a weak and devious argument. The concession was not granted because of the need of conscience, for if that was the case, then Luther would have to allow any Protestant tired of his first wife to marry a second wife. Protestantism and bigamy would have become synonymous. The concession was made because Philip was a Protestant prince but was threatening to ally himself with the Catholics if his wishes were not accommodated.

Like John the Baptist who denounced Herod for marrying his brother’s wife, so Luther and his colleagues should have stood up to Philip of Hesse and demanded he respect the sanctity of marriage. No man, not even a prince, is above the law in this matter.

It is understandable to feel aversion for such connivance; but should we hate Luther for taking part in this unpleasant business? That seems too strong a stance. With hindsight one wishes Luther would have had the faith to have acted with courage in regard to Philip’s adultery, leaving the consequences with God. He did not. Instead he took part in an unsuccessful cover up. It is a very human story. If though one was to hate every leader who has failed when confronted with a determined and powerful political patron, there would be a lot of hating to do.

Another shadow is that some of Luther’s vast literary output was vitriolic and crude, usually illustrated with wood-carvings to match the tone. For example in one tract he calls the pope’s officials ‘a crawling mass of reptiles.’ In another he castigates the pope for letting Rome become ‘the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death and hell so that not even Antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.’ Nor was Luther shy of using vulgar language, a particularly bad example was in one of his later tracts where he told the pope that indulgences were ‘an utter shitting’, that Pope Paul was an ‘ass pope’ who not only worshipped Satan, but ‘licked his behind’.

There is much more. Luther was a polemicist. Once he picked up his pen, perhaps like a Tertullian or an Augustine, he was not content until his opponent was bruised and bloodied in the corner.

Unpleasant, but given the thousands of words Luther wrote and spoke that edified, it would seem extreme to hate him for this vulgarity. Not least, because as Roland Bainton explains, vulgarity and rudeness were a part of the culture in the 16^th C. After a detailed description of the debate at Leipzig between Luther and Johan Eck, a German Catholic theologian, Bainton records a minor incident. The duke hosting the proceedings had a one-eyed court fool and to provide some comic relief the two theologians were asked to debate whether the man should have a wife or not. Eck was against and ‘was so opprobrious that the fool took offense; and whenever subsequently Eck entered the hall the fool made grimaces. Eck retaliated by mimicking the blind eye, at which the fool ripped out a volley of bitter profanity. The audience roared.’ Bainton tells this story to illustrate ‘the coarseness and insensitivity of that whole generation.’

The tone then can perhaps be overlooked, but there should be a pause over some of the content of Luther’s writings. In 1525 the German peasants erupted and after a year were brutally put down. Initially Luther tried to steer a middle course, but as the rebellion spread his position hardened and he wrote a tract, ‘Against he murdering and thieving hordes of peasants’. Luther believed in the divine authority of the state. So in this tract he urged for the princes to crush the peasants without mercy. It is not difficult to quote sections of this tract that give the impression that Luther is a blood thirsty authoritarian, for example: ‘Their ears must be unbuttoned with musket balls till their heads jump off their shoulders’. However if you read the whole tract Luther has a serious argument. Anarchy has broken loose in Germany, plundering and murder is marching over the land, and – crucial to Luther’s shift in position – the peasants had refused to negotiate. The first duty of any government is to provide law and order, indeed, as Luther wrote, this is commanded in Romans 13, hence the peasants must be dealt with.

When the street erupts Christians take different positions, and sometimes change their views. From peasant stock, Luther knew what his class chafed under, hence his initial refusal to condemn them, but when anarchy spread he gave the authorities his full support, using his usual robust style. It is possible to disagree with Luther here, but it is hard to see this as a reason for hating him.

There are other aspects of Luther that cast shadows rather than light. One would be his coldness towards Ulrich Zwingl, the Swiss Reformer, who admired Luther and sought his friendship. In 1529 Philip of Hesse  convened the Marburg conference, to bring agreement among the Reformers over Christ’s presence in the bread and the wine. Luther believed in the literal presence, Zwingli the symbolic. It is said that Luther was so antagonistic and cold to Zwingli that the latter was reduced to tears.

Another issue is Luther’s subdued support for the repression of the Anabaptists. However given the calamitous outcome when some of their number took over Muntzer in Westphalia (polygamy and endless executions), it is not surprising Luther moved against them, albeit with a plea that severity be tempered with mercy.

None of the above pushes Luther into the monster category. They do not make pleasant reading, but most great leaders also make terrible mistakes.

In all of these shadows there is one that brings death-like darkness. It stands like a high prison wall, covered in barbed wall, daubed with large letters that spell, ‘I hate Luther’. On this wall the graffiti makes sense; and rightly forbids any easy exit.

Sadly some have tried to side-step or, worse, ignore Luther’s virulent anti-Semitism. Roland Bainton spares just a few pages to the topic, asserting strangely that Luther’s position was ‘entirely religious and in no respect racial’. Eric Metaxas oddly calls Luther’s book against the Jews an ‘outlier’, when there are in fact three books about the Jews who are also denounced in Luther’s sermons. Vivian Green ignores the whole issue. A.G Dickens, former Emeritus Professor at the University of London, edited a book of documents on Luther, and chose to exclude all the material against the Jews.

This approach is regrettable. It neither does justice to the amount of time Luther gave to the subject; and, much worse, it does no justice to the millions who have suffered because of the policy Luther was advocating.

The wall has to be faced. The hate question treated as valid.

Luther thought deeply about the Jews all through his life. He took a clear position on them in his first set of lectures on the Psalms given between 1513 – 15; and they are in his thoughts in a letter to his wife just three weeks before his death.

There is though sharp zig-zagging in Luther’s views. In those first lectures the Jews ‘were an exemplar of God’s wrath, guilty of Christ’s death, and thus dishonoured among all nations.’ This was typical negative Medieval fare. However in the early days of the Reformation, there is a radical departure from the church’s normal hostility to the Jews. In his commentary on the Magnificat in 1521 Luther says that Christians ‘should not treat the Jews unkindly.’

And then in 1523 came Luther’s call for toleration in his book, ‘That Jesus Christ Was Born A Jew’. This was the most supportive treatise in its attitude to the Jews that had ever been seen in Medieval Christendom. It went through ten German editions, and Luther’s friend Justus Jonas translated it into Latin for an international audience. While the book’s main emphasis was an appeal to Jews to see that Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled the prophesies of their Old Testament, Luther also castigated the Roman Catholic church.

‘For our fool the popes, bishops, sophists and monks, all stupid donkeys, have treated the Jews in such a way that anyone who was a good Christian would have been apt to want to become a Jew.’

There is more in this vein and for a while Luther’s name was connected to a kindly attitude towards the Jews. Indeed Luther’s Catholic enemies used this against him. When the Reformer, Andreas Osiander, spoke out against the execution of thirty Jews for the murder of a nine-year-old boy in Pressburg, the cry from Johannes Eck, an arch Catholic opponent of the Reformation, was that Osiander was a ‘protector of the Jews’ and a ‘Lutheran scoundrel’.

This radical season did not last long. As early as 1526 in a sermon on Psalm 109 Luther said that Jews ‘Simply think that Christ was a wicked scoundrel who was crucified with other scoundrels because of his wickedness.’ Then he says that ‘Satan has blinded their eyes because, despite the proof of Scripture, they remain obdurate. They are simply impossible to convert’.

Luther’s anger at the Jews rejection of Christ continued to rise. In 1537 he was told that Jews in Bavaria were circumcising Christians. They called themselves Sabbatarians. Luther was enraged and wrote ‘Against the Sabbatarians’ where the words ‘flew across the page’. The book was not about legal minded Christians determined to keep the law, it was an attack on the Jews for not turning to their Messiah, and a warning to Christians to keep away from them.

This tract did not sell well, but Luther was not through with the matter. In the autumn of 1542 he picked up his pen again to write about the Jews. The result was a 288 page book, entitled, ‘On The Jews And Their Lies’. Here he claimed that the Jews twisted the Old Testament; mocked Christ and Mary in private; and wanted to convert Christians. Luther believed the Jews threatened Christian society and must be dealt with. The actions he proposes are shocking: their synagogues and homes should be burned; their wealth taken; the Jews should be made to live in barns to work the land; and all religious worship banned on pain of death. This was harsh segregation. By the end of his life Luther wanted the Jews to be expelled from Christian lands. This is clearly seen in that letter to his wife just three weeks before he died. On the 28^th January 1546 a journey to Eisleben Luther became dizzy and broke out into a cold sweat. It was likely he was having a minor heart attack. His immediate diagnosis though was less medical.

‘I felt my strength leave me just outside Eisleben…if you’d been there you would have said it was the fault of the Jews or their God. For just outside Eisleben we had to go through a village where a lot of Jews live and perhaps it was they who blew on me so hard.’

Then later in this same letter he writes: ‘I have to get on with expelling the Jews’.

There is nothing of the ‘outlier’ here. This is a man with a hateful mind-set which is there for all to see on his final journey before he died.

What though had turned the man famous in Europe for befriending the Jews into the man whose name is now synonymous with anti-Semitism?

Thomas Kaufmann in his book ‘Luther’s Jews’ draws attention to the fact that in Luther’s famous plea for tolerance in 1523 there is a qualification: ‘until I can see what effect I have had.’ Kaufmann argues with some persuasion that Luther and his colleagues, especially Justas Jonas, believed they were living in the last days which meant there would be a turning of the Jews to Christ. So Luther’s work was written for that expected harvest. This was an invitation from God’s prophet in Wittenberg for the Jews to believe what was irrefutable, that Jesus was their Messiah, and so become Christian. However the invitation was temporary, the prophet was concerned about the effect. The implication being that if the invitation was spurned, so Luther’s approach would darken. There was no response, and Luther’s approach certainly darkened. It reverted back to his former hostility - with a vengeance.

Given that the Nazis constantly used Luther’s writings to lay the foundation for the Holocaust it is difficult not to accept Luther the man should be hated. He is responsible for the words he has written. He could have stepped back, re-read the Sermon on the Mount, realised his words were deeply offensive to Christ’s Gospel of love, thrown his last book away, and written an apology to the Jews for his ‘Against The Sabbatarians’ and any other hateful words he had directed at them.

But he did not. Indeed just three weeks before his death he was writing about ‘expelling the Jews.’ To hate Luther is understandable.

Wiser to hesitate

However perhaps it is wiser to hesitate when one considers two fixed pillars in the world Luther grew up in. One was anti-Antisemitism, the other that Medieval society was what the historian Paul Johnson calls a ‘total society’.

Everyone in Luther’s Europe was anti-Semitic. The Jews were Christ’s murderers, visibly enduring God’s wrath for this heinous crime. We associate the name of Erasmus with the New Learning and the man who wanted the ploughman to be singing the Psalms. But he, like Luther, was deeply anti-Semitic. While defending Reuchlin, the Hebrew expert, against charges of heresy, Erasmus wrote to Hochstraten, Reuchlin’s opponent, and said he was not at all interested in the Kabballah and agreed that the Jews had seductive powers – and, he then asks this question and gives his own answer, an answer which scorns Roland Bainton’s assertion that there was nothing racial in the church’s attitude to the Jews.

‘Who is there among us that does not sufficiently detest that race of men? If it is Christian to hate the Jews, we are all Christian enough in this regard.’

This racism raged among the erudite in the universities, in Europe’s palaces and markets, in her villages and towns. It was garnished with venomous rumours: the Jews desecrated the host, poisoned wells, murdered children.

Luther grew up soaked in this thinking. Moreover as a young teenager he would have heard of how in the 1490s Spain, Portugal, Sicily, and nearby Nuremberg had expelled all their Jews. England had done so much earlier.

Once the Jews did not respond to the proof set out in the Old Testament regarding Christ, Luther’s position returned to what was normal for Erasmus and everyone else in Medieval Europe, except now his hostility had the tone of a rejected suitor. It was sharper, more personal, especially as Luther believed his Catholic enemies were sending Jewish spies to poison him.

In the 1530s Luther read a book by an insider that darkly confirmed all his suspicions about the Jews. This was ‘The Entire Jewish Faith’ by the Jewish convert Antonius Margritha. It went through six editions. While there was immense detail about all the Jewish rituals and ceremonies, the dominant empahsis was that the Jews were the virulent enemies of Christians. Everything in their prayers were directed against the church; on Passover Day they cursed Christ; they were longing for their Messiah who would annihilate all Christians. Meanwhile they were doing secret deals with the Turks to bring about the overthrow of Christendom. Margritha sounds similar to Muslim converts to Christianity today who make a living out of frightening Christians with how Islam is planning on wold domination. Then as now it is the fact that they are converts that persuades usually sensible people of what is no more than a vacuous conspiracy theory. Sadly it is clear that Luther was persuaded.

And as a church leader Luther had a responsibility to give guidance about the Jews. This brings us to the second pillar that was fixed in Luther’s world: the total society. All was under the power of the state and the church, who ruled a society which was homogeneous.

In this system a leading church-man such as Luther had a duty to work with the state to ensure that society remained intact. Hence, he could not ignore the issue of the Jews. Their presence challenged the total society, both racially and religiously, and books like Margritha’s turned them into a dangerous fifth column. The total society had just three options for the Jews: conversion; segregation; or expulsion. Since the Jews had rejected conversion, Luther first advocated segregation, and then, just before his death, he was calling for the Jews to be expelled. It is worth noting though that Luther never advocated murder.

These two fixed pillars in the Medieval world – anti-Semitism and demand for total homogeneity – were so firmly rooted that Luther was unable to escape their shadow when it came to thinking about the Jews. Interestingly Luther himself was aware of how difficult it was to shake off one’s background. This is what he told his students in 1531 about Catholicism:

‘We old men soaked in the pestilent doctrine of the papists which we have taken into our very bones and marrow…cannot even today cast that opinion out of minds. For habits acquired in tender years cling with the utmost persistence.’

If this was true for residual Roman Catholicism in Luther’s mind, it was equally true for anti-Antisemitism. It was in his bones and marrow, and once the Jews rejected his 1523 invitation, that pestilent prejudice broke out. He should have seen that the very Scriptures he was translating forbade persecuting the weak, that the Christ Luther loved was a friend to the outcast and alien. But those ‘habits acquired in tender years clung with utmost persistence.’

None of this alters that fact that what Luther wrote was dreadful; but it makes me hesitate to hate him as a man. Rather I have to accept that Luther, like most of us, was unable to see beyond the paradigms of his own times, but that does not mean rendering honour where honour is due and leaving his statues in peace. 

I hesitate, but I can understand why some, without hesitation, are ready to say ‘I hate Luther’.

I though prefer the conclusion of G.R Elton, another great historian of this period, who underlines the fallibility of the human condition. 

‘Being a man, he (Luther) had both served and harmed mankind; and since he was a great man, both the service and possibly the harm were beyond the ordinary.’